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<title>Angels Don't Get Their Wings Back, Do They? by XEVIANT</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26431033">Angels Don't Get Their Wings Back, Do They?</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/XEVIANT/pseuds/XEVIANT'>XEVIANT</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:28:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,290</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26431033</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/XEVIANT/pseuds/XEVIANT</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Connor deals with the existentialist reality of being practically immortal in a world of humans.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Angels Don't Get Their Wings Back, Do They?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is simply an excuse to be sad and prosy ( and also to make my android/angel parallels owo )</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The precinct was as it had been for years; choreographed cogs ever moving in tandem with one another. Connor gazed upon them from his desk, rolling a quarter over his knuckles as he did before flicking it into the air. The gentle metal tink that came from the coin when it was flipped stood out amongst the indiscernible conversations in the precinct and it drew his attention. His head turned as the coin fell into his now open palm and his brows raised diminutively on his forehead. He didn’t understand at the time why Hank had his... limits when it came to just how habitually he tinkered with the bauble, but after having it distract even himself, he amusingly understood the sentiment. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He pursed his lips together and closed his fingers gently over his palm with a soft sigh. Hank. Connor looked to the desk across his. It was clean, and nearly empty. No longer was it cluttered by old memorabilia and half-empty coffee mugs, now that Connor thought about it, it hadn’t been that way for a long time. He turned his attention back to his own desk, that practically mirrored the one across him save for a framed photograph and a blossoming bonsai japanese maple. Hank had considered getting rid of it at one point and Connor remembered rejecting the proposal outright, instead promising to take care of it for him. Connor just wasn’t prepared for the day that he would have had to move it from Hank’s desk and onto his. It still felt foreign there.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor slipped the coin back into his back pocket and rolled his chair closer to his desk the way he could reach the photograph that rested towards the back. The picture was dated at the bottom. December, 25th, 2042. It was taken in Hank’s kitchen: Connor sat beside a man named Jimmy and the lieutenant at his dining room table, Sumo was pictured resting by their feet on the linoleum floor. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They had lost Sumo first, Hank followed a few years after that. Connor remembered the house after they had both left. Quiet. He remembered it because he had no other choice but to, he returned to the same empty house every night after, and he’d do the same thing tonight. Decades passed and still, he missed the sound of soft paws trudging against the floor, and the sound of the sports channel running far after Hank had fallen asleep on the couch, he missed the sound of Hanks music, even when he played it at deafening volumes that Connor made a habit of warning him about. He missed Hank.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor had been assigned with many other detectives since his passing, and he cared for most of them, but they weren’t Hank. He was almost sure he wouldn’t meet anyone like Hank again. Connor set the photograph back onto the desk and looked around the precinct once more. Captain Fowler no longer sat behind his glass-walled office, Gavin and Tina weren’t at their desks, or the break room. The faces that passed him were now wildly unfamiliar to him, decades and decades, nearing a second century’s worth of people that seemingly blended into one discernible face in every person he saw; like strangers. He wished for a moment that they really were strangers, it may have hurt less when they left too. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Hurt. God it Hurt. It Never Stopped Hurting. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His gaze passed over Nines who had been watching him stare at the picture from his desk. Connor had lost Hank, and he lost a guiding light with a stern hand, and everyone knew Nines had lost his lover, and as far as Connor knew, never took another. The RK900 model gave him a somewhat sympathetic look, checking over him before turning his attention back to his terminal. He didn’t need to say anything, they both knew what it felt like. A silent understanding was a rare thing, and he was grateful to have it, even if he never expressed it, as if acknowledging it would somehow tarnish the comfort it gave him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A commotion to his right pulls him out of his daze and he snapped his head to the right, it’s a new intern back from a food run who was stumbling forward, just about ready to drop the food and fall along with it. Connor is quick to his feet and rushes over, catching the woman by her shoulder to balance her. She looked up at him and exhaled harshly. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Are you alright?” He asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, yeah I’m good. Shit, you really saved my ass. You don’t know how long it took me to get this, Michael would have killed me if he had to wait any longer.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He hummed in understanding. “Michael does have a tendency to be….. overly impatient at times.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh trust me you don’t have to tell me. I should get this to him though. You’re an angel, Connor!” She called back as she made her way over to Michael’s desk across the room.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor nodded and walked back over to his own desk and sat down. He paused for a moment. An angel? Despite the quaint nature of the comment, Connor couldn’t help but think about it: He thought about how he had watched over the precinct since before all of the humans in it were born, how he had watched career after career bud, flourish, and wither in age, he thought about the relief and pure expression of gratitude extended by people when missing person’s cases were solved with no casualties. He remembered the warm feeling that resonated in his chest when those things happened, the mixture of pride and joy in the work he did. Saving people, protecting them, making their home safe. The longer he thought about it, the more oddly fitting ‘Angel’ sounded to him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The divinity of angels bred the eternal, and technological immortality bred divinity. A divinity laced in a responsibility and a duty so profound it leaves no other option than to submit. To submit to your role, to what you must do to protect what you love, to submit to something greater than yourself, to something unexplainable.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Connor thought back to his deviation, and to Amanda, to how rebellious angels were cast out of heaven with their wings torn from their body, forced to walk the Earth as men. Lost in this new train of thought, he wondered who cast who from the Kingdom of God, him or Amanda. If it were he who were cast, he supposed that having no other choice than to bear the burden of the human condition would have been a just punishment in Amanda’s eyes. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>To be cast down, bathed in the last exalted golden light of a home that can no longer be described by tongue, and to rebel and be forced into immobility if not by gored wings, by being weighted by the knowledge and responsibility of what he’d done. To live eternally alone.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Alone. That’s what he felt. Tired and Alone.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He paused. The archangels never got their wings back though, did they? Connor had always replaced his parts when they were damaged, or in need of being replaced. In fact, he was due for replacements soon. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>What if he didn’t want to though? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Perhaps he was tired of being tired, perhaps in that very moment he objected to the idea that he must walk the Earth eternally. That he deserved rest of his own. That had he been cast down from the Kingdom of God and forced to submit to the human condition that he would experience it in its entirety. To be human is to experience it's end. Connor planned on having an end. </span>
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